Jesus, Piers Morgan is a terrible person

Watch this embarrassing spectacle: he berates Ash Sarkar for protesting Trump’s visit to London because he claims she didn’t protest Obama’s immigration policies enough. This is a regular “Dear Muslima”: let’s rank offenses so we can tell people to shut up if they haven’t protested everything. Sarkar, at least, hammers back, which was satisfying.

As a teacher, the worst bit for me was when he asks her how many people were deported under Obama, she says she doesn’t know the number but she was aware of the expansion of repressive immigration policies under Obama, and Morgan just badgers her incessantly to name a number when she’s plainly said she doesn’t know. That’s the worst kind of gotcha game. And then he uses the fact that she doesn’t have this one number at her fingertips to claim that Obama is her “hero” — which leads her to point out that she’s a communist and doesn’t support the American Democratic party.

He is just a terrible person. We Americans drove him out of the US by not watching his obnoxious, awful program — maybe the UK needs to catch up with us in this one regard.

Can you have him deported?

Congratulations to Ben & Abi!

One of the major reasons I’m out here on the West coast is for the wedding of my nephew, Ben, to Abi (here with her mother).

Wedding accomplished!

Now I get to tell a story. Many years ago, when I would walk home from school back in junior high and high school, I would sometimes walk with a girl who lived a few blocks from me. My little sister Lisa (Ben’s mother), who was then around 5 to 7 years old, would sit on the front step of our house, and when she would see us, she would sing out, “Paa-aul’s got a girrrl frieeend!” and then run inside giggling. Her magic chant apparently was effective since I later married that girl and am still happily married these many years later.

So I’ll return the enchantment, since Lisa is no longer around to do it for him. “Be-een’s got a girrrl frieeend!”

Now he’ll have many decades of happiness. Guaranteed.

That was a bar so low I thought they couldn’t possibly limbo under it

Some right-wingers are making a low-budget anti-choice movie titled Roe v. Wade, which features the usual looney-tunes suspects, like Milo Yiannopoulos and Tomi Lahren and Jon Voight and Corbin Bernsen, and if you follow the link you’ll find lots of clues that this is going to be a flaming shitshow. But one simple point is a truly damning indictment.

Conservative actors Stephen Baldwin and Kevin Sorbo were initially cast as Supreme Court justices but left upon receiving the script. “That’s where it started as far as not sending out full scripts to actors, because they backed out and then it was a mad rush to find people to be the Supreme Court justices, and when they got on set they had no idea what they were doing. They didn’t get their lines until they got on set. They were kept in the dark,” according to a crew member.

The script is so bad that Kevin Sorbo and Stephen Baldwin refused a pay day? Holy crap. I’ve seen some of their previous movies, and I have a hard time imagining a movie that’s even worse.

UMIAEAC!

I stumbled across this article from Ben Rehder on Facebook. It sounded familiar.

I received an emailed pitch this morning from “an established, full service book publishing and book marketing publisher with global distribution and rights to help support book sales.” I googled the address they provided in the email and found their office:

Anyone remember Department of ProtoBioCybernetics and ProtoBioSemiotics of Origin of Life Science Foundation, Inc.?

Just a reminder that you can call your house anything you want. Why settle for “Bide-A-Wee”, or nothing at all, when you can christen your home “The Upper Midwestern Institute for the Accelerated Evolutionary Advancement of Cephalopods”? Well, you can’t use that name. It’s taken already.

Bawbags?

I missed two concerts recently. The first was Roger Waters, who I did see last year, but he was in Scotland and so he had to modify his stage sets a little.

Heh. It’s not an slander, it’s true!

I regret not being able to see that show. I’m not regretting missing the one in St Paul last week, but we did get a glorious review of the Jimmy Buffett and Eagles concert. Read it. It’s one good thing to come out of the event.

Has anyone else lost all interest in celebrating the 4th of July?

I know I have. There is a lot of high sentiment in that ol’ declaration of independence, but 240+ years of this country failing to live up to them, and now deciding to just give up and abandon every noble principle expressed in it, doesn’t leave me feeling like commemorating much of anything.

This will be a good day for fasting, working, and watching the rain come down (it’s a thunderstorm day here in Morris, good for Nature for putting a wet blanket on the annoying fireworks.)

Please, stop with the goofy fads

OK, this is a weird one: getting a “pedicure” by putting your feet in a tub with Garra rufa, a small fish that then industriously nibbles dead skin away. That’s not a pedicure, for one, and two, it probably doesn’t do anything for you, although it does feed the fish, and three…your toenails might fall off, probably due to secondary infections.

The CDC has a few things to say about the practice.

  • The fish pedicure tubs cannot be sufficiently cleaned between customers when the fish are present.
  • The fish themselves cannot be disinfected or sanitized between customers. Due to the cost of the fish, salon owners are likely to use the same fish multiple times with different customers, which increases the risk of spreading infection.
  • Chinese Chinchin, another species of fish that is often mislabeled as Garra rufa and used in fish pedicures, grows teeth and can draw blood, increasing the risk of infection.
  • According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Garra rufa could pose a threat to native plant and animal life if released into the wild because the fish is not native to the United States.
  • Fish pedicures do not meet the legal definition of a pedicure.
  • Regulations specifying that fish at a salon must be contained in an aquarium.
  • The fish must be starved to eat skin, which might be considered animal cruelty.

Next step up: dunk your toes in a tank full of piranha.

What if we planned a sneak attack and a civil war, and didn’t tell anyone?

Except Alex Jones, of course.

Somehow, we antifa/commie/liberal Democrats are supposed to fire up this war on the 4th of July — in two days — and there has been no communication at all to us cannon fodder. But Alex Jones knows all about it! Apparently, it was announced in the liberal “Elite Publications” last year, but I missed it.

Anyone know what those publications are? Because I’ve also missed out on all of those.

Oh, well, I guess I’ll have to dig up my old uniform — birks, shorts, tie-dye t-shirt, and headband — put a flower in my hair and march off to San Francisco. Or wherever the old hippies have set up a staging ground. I wonder if we can get the Dead back together to play for the Revolution?